I am fond of telling the tale of the inventor of chess and his
patron, the Emperor of China.

In response to the emperor’s offer of a reward for his new
beloved game, the inventor asked for a single grain of rice on
the first square, two on the second square, four on the third,
and so on. The Emperor quickly granted this seemingly benign and
humble request.

One version of the story has the emperor going bankrupt as the 63
doublings ultimately totaled 18 million trillion grains of rice.
At ten grains of rice per square inch, this requires rice fields
covering twice the surface area of the Earth, oceans included.
Another version of the story has the inventor losing his
head.

Kurzweil contends that we're in the middle of that
chessboard.

So things are about to get way, way more exponential.

"As exponential growth continues to accelerate into the first
half of the twenty-first century," he writes. "It will appear to
explode into infinity, at least from the limited and linear
perspective of contemporary humans."

Kurzweil and his peers have a name for that explosion: the
Singularity, the moment when computer intelligence supplants
human intelligence as the smartest thing around. It's
either very good — or very terrible — news.